Question: What exactly is chemotherapy and does it have any effects on the body?

Chemotherapy is one of the most important treatments we have for cancers of all kinds. Cancer cells are cells of the body where mutations in their DNA have caused them to grow out of control. All the normal checks that a cell has – proteins to tell it when to stop dividing, proteins that repair any errors in the DNA – are damaged and so the cell grows out of control. Chemotherapy is basically a term for a group of drugs that target rapidly dividing cells – they are poisons that kill these cells. Some of these drugs are derived from natural sources, like taxol. Others were synthesised in the lab. They are pretty effective most of the time, but they don’t work on all kinds of cancers, which is why we have other treatments like radiation therapy. They a kind of blunt instrument that we use for many kinds of cancers, they don’t target anything specific about the cancer itself except the rapid division of the cells. As there are many other dividing cells in the body, this means that the chemotherapy can affect them too. This is what makes patients sick, lose their hair when they have chemotherapy. So while chemo is often really effective, if we can create treatments that mean we use less chemotherapy or combine it with some other treatment, we can more effectively treat the cancer.